Ted Vallance's "A Radical History of Britain" will serve as an excellent introduction to the British Radicalism 1780-1880 course. The book takes the theme of radical protest and traces its development from the age of the Saxons right through to the suspension of Habeas Corpus under New Labour in 2008. 

Vallance's writing is fast paced and engaging. He covers the historical detail without the book becoming overly heavy (it is a thousand years of history after all) and still manages to drop in some interesting tid bits. Did you know for example that ex-boxer "Kosher" Hunt was assigned to guard Sylvia Pankhurst as the Suffragette campaign became more violent. 

Whilst there is not enough depth here for this to be your only read for the course, the outline provided will certainly help you to put things into context. In addition to this, Vallance's own views shine from the pages, and I often found myself carried along by the force of his convictions. The book finishes by looking at the state of political agitation today and raises a number of important issues about protecting our political rights and freedoms in a world where protest has become taboo.

Highly recommended. 

You can now download Eric Hobsbawm's excellent "The Age of Revolution". Whilst it is quite a difficult academic text, it does provide an excellent overview of the early part of our period and Hobsbawm is an engaging writer. Note Hobsbawm's distincly Marxist perspective here too.